Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
The latter was expected to grow at the expense of the former as the
external dynamics of modernization brought about societal change.
This externally driven change comes about in stages of 'development' in
which rationality, disenchantment with nature, social differentiation
and specialization serve to distinguish modernizing societies from tra-
ditional. The traditional rural societies of Africa and Asia are expected
inevitably to give way to the urban-industrial and modernized capital-
ist societies that Europe and North America have become. Unfortunately,
the sociological jargon that was so familiarly used by the lauded socio-
logical authorities to explain how such modernization should occur was
so turgid in its formulations as to render many sociological explana-
tions tautological, vague and unintelligible.
Psychological versions of modernization theory also partnered those
formulated by sociologists, in which psychological motives and values
lead 'modern men' to behave rationally and entrepreneurially. This fol-
lowed Weber's connection between the Protestant ethic and the spirit of
capitalism, claiming it as a European advantage and a demonstration
of Western superiority and advancement. Such was the persuasiveness
of this construct that, in the late 1960s, Harvard researcher Alex
Inkeles undertook field research to search for the common values and
attitudes among 6,000 'modern men' in six developing countries:
Argentina, Chile, India, Israel, Pakistan and Nigeria (Inkeles, 1969).
It was, however, the economic constructs built upon modernization's
'top-down' tenets that had the most lasting influence during these early
development decades of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Central to this
economic formulation was the work of W.W. Rostow and his influential
topic
The Stages of Economic Growth: A Non-communist Manifesto
pub-
lished in the 1960s
.
As evidenced in the title, Rostow had interwoven
two major concerns: one political and strategic, the other economic and
developmental. Rostow was geo-politically concerned with the interna-
tional and political contexts of the process of transition in Third World
nation states. His model, accordingly, was constructed in large part to
further the strategic influence of the United States. It was aimed at
countering the USSR's expansionist superpower designs that the US
feared would promote 'development' via communism and socialist
regimes in post-colonial Africa, Asia and Latin America.
Rostow's model proposed that all societies would be able to pass
through five stages: traditional society, preconditions for take-off,
take-off, the road to maturity and the age of mass consumption. Crucial
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